Well guys, 10 years later the pictures are finally up. First though, I suppose I should be obliged to put out a word of warning that a few of the pictures (specifically the ones in the ‘Tenerife’ album) have a PG-13 rating, and should be viewed with the utmost caution, lest the obscenity burn a hole in your retinas.
Obviously, I’m joking, but seriously – view with discretion. Like I said a few weeks ago, Carnival in Spain is one of the most… enlightening? (yeah, that’s gotta be the right word) experiences I’ve ever had. I won’t be able to give you all the details (first rule of Fight Club?) but I’ll try my darndest to arrange enough puzzle pieces together into a coherent depiction of what is Carnival in Spain.
Now, the whole trip wasn’t all craziness and transvestites; it actually started off as a pretty average vacation. I left Ferrol on a train along the northern coast of Spain and had my first stop in Oviedo, Asturias. Aside from an absolutely wonderful CouchSurfing host (hey Pavla!) who even went so far as to let me sleep in her bed while she slept on the couch, nothing all too noteworthy happened there. Except for walking down the street and periodically hearing a group of people speaking in English; that doesn’t happen in Ferrol. So the next morning, after missing the first sold out bus and waiting in the bus station for 2 hours while this still-drunk-from-the-night-before guy tried to have the world’s best conversation with me, I set off towards Bilbao. I can’t even tell you how excited I was – Bilbao was the very last major city I had left to visit, and it’s the one I had been wanting to see the most for a couple of years.
Once I got there, my CSing host Gonzalo took me on a bit of a walk around the Casco Viejo (old part) and up to the Guggenheim. The Guggenheim = pure genius.
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| the amazing light installation inside |
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| the Guggenheim and Puppy |
I think the Guggenheim pictures really speak for themselves (check out more in the Bilbao album to the right), all I can really say is that it completely blew me away.
The second night there we took off with Gonzalo’s friends to the little beach town of Laredo, where there was a big Carnival celebration. People were dressed up as pretty much anything you can imagine, but I think one of my favorites was the big group of high school boys dressed up like the Denver Broncos (or at least i think that's who they're supposed to be....)
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| dude dressed up like a lego man. saweeeeet! |
The next day we went back to Bilbao and hung around for awhile, but unfortunately, that was pretty much it for my trip to Bilbao. There are a few other inconsequential details, but since I was only there for a couple days I really didn’t get to explore the city too much. I guess I’ll just have to go back. I did get to eat some pretty tasty pintxos (Basque tapas), which the Basque region is famous for, even in Spain.
Sunday I took off for San Sebastian, where I would meet Leslie and her friend Julie from back home. Apparently though, somewhere along the way from Bilbao to San Sebastian half my brain decided to go haywire. Halfway through a phone conversation at the San Sebastian bus station with my next CouchSurfing host, Juanma, I realized I left my backpack on the bus. My backpack which had all my worldly possessions in it, and the bus that had just driven away for its next stop in some other town. Crap. I’m not going to go through the details of me trying to get my backpack back, mostly because it’s still making me cringe just thinking about it, but after a ton of unnecessary drama and a Spanish woman working at the bus station being the opposite of helpful and telling me that since it wasn’t stolen I was out of luck, I did eventually get it back the next day and all was well. I can’t really say much else about the city of San Sebastian. It was a very lovely city with a beautiful beach, but 99% of my time there was spent panicking and trying to recover my bag. Bleh.
I guess I could say though that compared to a lot of cities here, it was impeccably clean and neat – somewhat to a fault. Also, there was a huge nationalist supporting (people who want Basque Country to be its own country) in the region around San Sebastian and there were even some posters up about the ETA (the local terrorist group) prisoners. It was quite the difference from Bilbao, which is also in Basque Country, where people hardly even speak Basque. I realize most of you have no idea about anything about the history of Basque Country, but it’s very unique and interesting. The Basque people are said to be the oldest civilization in Europe, and the Basque language is so distinct that they don’t even know where it originated from (unlike the Galician language, which has obvious ties to Spanish and Portuguese). Because of such a history, there’s obviously a lot of drama about wanting to become a country of its own. Anyway though, it’s an interesting history to read about if you’re ever bored with some time on your hands.
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| ETA terrorists |
But enough about that. After a couple stressful days in San Sebastian, Leslie and Julie headed east to Barcelona, and I set off the opposite direction for Santander – my last stop up north. I was greeted by my last CSing host, David, who had obviously been through a bit of his own Carnival disaster extravaganza, as had his apartment. We made some sandwiches and set off on bikes around the city, where David played the perfect tour guide. He showed me this less-than-interesting church which was donned with plasma TVs every 6 feet, and then we took a ride up to a beautiful park where we had a picnic. Later that night we went to the Santander library to meet a friend and see this 80’s exhibit that was going on, with lots of funny Spanish 80’s toys and whatnot. We also found an Osama Bin Laden comic book in the library, which was very strange.
The next afternoon, I grabbed a flight to Madrid to meet up with Callie and Sheena (American friends who live in Ferrol) and stay the night before our flight out to the Canary Islands the next morning. My friend Fernando took us to this amazing little underground Chinese restaurant, and then out to an Italian language exchange bar. The Italian bar was really cool; it was basically an intercambio place where you could go and practice another language, and as long as you bought a pint of beer you could eat as much of the authentic Italian food as you’d like. So all in all, a pretty sweet deal. We also met the Italian guy who organized the whole night, and of course he pounced on us Americans, begging one of us to marry him so he could get American residency. Our wedding’s this summer, for those interested, and my new Italian husband will come live with me in Nebraska next year ;)
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| My new Italian fiancee... though I can't remember his name for the life of me. I obviously cared much more about the tasty food and pint of beer... |
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| Oh yeah! The Nebraska restaurant in Madrid!!! I've heard the food is terrible though... haha |
The rest of the night we spent out with some German and Venezuelan friends we met at the Italian place, and then around 4:00 we headed toward the airport for our flight to Tenerife.
Tenerife was just beautiful. And crazy. The first day we were there, we rented a couple of cars (by that point there were 7 of us) to make a trek up the volcano that sits in the middle of the island. We probably should have heeded the warning that the gas station attendant gave us about the bad weather, but of course we didn’t, so we ended up halfway up a volcano surrounded by fog and about 5 feet of visibility. I’m not gonna lie, I was freaking out a bit. Dang claustrophobia.
After a certain point though, we were above the fog and it was mostly clear. Before going back into town, we stopped at a black sand beach, formed from the ash of the volcano mixing with the sand, and then at this delicious barbeque restaurant in the mountains. On our way back down the mountain, we made a pit stop at a gas station, where as luck would have it, I got stuck in the bathroom for about 15 minutes.
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| "I just don't think I can fit" |
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| The rest of them trying to get me out, and of course taking pictures. |
The next couple days were spent with the Carnival festivities. During the day we went out to watch the parades and competitions in the streets, and at nights we joined the young and old in the street for Europe’s largest Carnival celebration. It’s a really amazing event, and the costume of choice for just about every man was to dress up as a woman. We met people dressed up as just about anything and anyone, from Vanilla Ice, to Monica Lewinsky, to an Avon Lady.
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| Lady Gaga and I |
So that’s about it with Carnival. I know I said it was a spectacular event and that I would tell you all about it and everything, but it’s really one of those things where I think the pictures say far more about it than anything I could type. The album to the right should give you a pretty good idea of what it was all about.
But apart from that, the past few weeks I’ve mostly just been trying to catch up on all the stuff I’ve missed while traveling, most of which is sleep. Last weekend we did a small trip to Vigo, a city in southern Galicia, to see José González (who is actually Swedish, not Spanish) and visit our rugby playing friends from New Zealand, who were having a huge going away dinner with Argentinian barbeque. I was the only one brave enough to try the brains.
In other news, this past week was BEAUTIFUL, with temperatures in the 80’s, so of course, we went to the beach on Friday! It was wonderful, and I got to swim in the ocean and everything :) Afterwards a friend of ours drove us around the area and showed us some cool views of the beaches and little villages. (more photos on the right)
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| life in Galicia is so rough :) |
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| Katharina kept making me pose :( |
Welp, that's all folks. The rest of the week will be spent packing and getting reading for Mom and Dad to come on Thursday, which I'm super excited about! The next blog you'll read will have lots of pictures of the two of them, so get excited! I leave you with two very appropriate soundtracks for the week's blog:
Un saludo desde Galicia! [PS -- "hace calor" means "it's hot"]
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